


final reentry

by cosmicpoet



Series: momoharu week 2018 [4]
Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Afterlife, Angst, F/M, Stargazing, Vague Happy Ending (if you squint)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-04-21 18:04:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14290353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmicpoet/pseuds/cosmicpoet
Summary: Momota is dead, and stuck within the stars, desperate to send a sign to Harakawa as she watches below.





	final reentry

Death brings knowledge in every time; the inescapable expansion of a disembodied mind. Momota knows this, since he blackened his lungs and his heart in his execution, and the world faded around him. Like everything was nothing more than a watercolour painting left out in the rain, all of the stars around him decorated his death with beauty, and in this beauty, he found that even his fast-fading mind held the image of Harukawa steadfast.

And yet, death is not as cold as he’d imagined. He simply exists in…nothingness. The game continued after he passed, and with his vast understanding of the universe, he saw that Harukawa…his Harumaki…had survived.

Which comes as a blessing. Of course, he knows now that the foundations of his life, which have long since crumbled, were all fake anyway; he was a man destined to fall, strung up and manipulated by Team Danganronpa. It sickens him, now, in the not-quite-afterlife, to think that he was never the Ultimate Astronaut he had prided himself on being – everything he relied on, held dear…all that is gone, now. More fleeting than Akamatsu’s hands on the pianos she never played, or the guns that Harukawa never fired.

Sure, he is dead, but having never truly lived, this isn’t the problem.

The problem is that he is stuck in the unfelt humidity of the stars. Like targets, primed to shoot him down, he hangs disembodied in the sky, naught more than a soul waiting for retribution now. Were Harukawa to look upwards, she would see nothing at all – perhaps, with all her concentration, she would see a faint wisp of smoke, but nothing more. Nothing so tactile and genuine as the person Momota used to be, after he lost his grip on the person he was before.

 _“Too many personalities,”_ he thinks, having still enough of a consciousness to process the ache in his afterlife. There’s nothing for him to hold onto any more, nothing tangible for him to rely on. As much as he wishes, he cannot think _“I have lived,”_ in any capacity that doesn’t call into question the authenticity of his biased experience.

There are, however, a certain set of things that he knows.

_I am dead. I can watch over Harumaki. I see the stars. I have loved, and I still love._

These certainties are the only chains that tether him to what can best be described as cosmic purgatory. To visualise this, he imagines himself as hanging amongst the stars, suspended in faux-animation, a conundrum wherein he can only move when the remnants of Team Danganronpa’s marionette strings are pulled from somewhere unknown, behind the scenes. Because, after all, even though he has knowledge of how he was…before the game, it doesn’t resonate at all with his lingering memory. He may be dead, but he hasn’t destroyed himself enough to believe that he is anything but the way he was when he fell in love with Harukawa.

And Harukawa…he sees her now, sitting outside in the garden. He presumes she’s abandoned Saihara and Yumeno inside – from what he has gathered, they live together now, trying to piece each other back into how they _should_ be. It’s almost like he can see the cracks running down her spine, the scars on her arms; remnants of pain, and he aches to feel them. Being dead is an eternal full immersion into sensory deprivation, and even his heartache is muted; he longs to hold her face in his hands, feel the softness of her lips on his. Even the pain, on the nights when he hears her screaming at the sky…he wants to feel his own throat rip apart in her place.

Being dead is…eternal. And there’s no one way to describe the hell of basic eternity; Momota has tried to look on the bright side, but his optimism has dulled into monotony, and his only reprieve from this infinite liminality is watching Harukawa when she looks up at the stars. It’s hard to die once you’re dead, and Momota sickens himself with the thought that forever, he will become as _Tantalus_ and watch her just out of reach.

She’s speaking now, and he wishes that he was close enough to hear. Just the smooth, sweet sound of her voice would no doubt give him something to hold onto in this torturous afterlife. Although he tries, it is a fruitless endeavour, but at least he can still stare at the way starlight dances across her face; the universe’s way of telling her that he loves her, as he loved her in the game, and how he now loves her from above.

All he can think of is to send her a sign. Something more solid; something she can hold onto. He hated leaving her like that. He hated himself for making her cry. Coughing blood onto her fragile hands as she held his face – he can’t put her through any agony this time.

And suddenly, he can hear her voice. She’s screaming now, right at the stars, echoing his name across the galaxy with such longing and pain in her expression. He imagines that her throat is cutting itself raw as she calls to him, presumably unaware that he can hear her – _he can hear her._

He has the strength now. Something within her has ignited something within him, and he feels that he can control his spirit once more. It’s freeing, but limited – he knows that this won’t last, and he needs to give her a sign. Something; anything. And perhaps all he can do is burn himself up.

_God, he’s feeling again._

The magnitude of agony sears through every part of his soul, burning in the chest that he no longer has, ripping him from his liminal place in the stars and sending him crashing to earth, closer and closer to her. He knows that he can never touch her again, and that this is something more than death, but he sees himself reflected in her eyes – a shooting star.

**Author's Note:**

> Day Four's prompt was 'Stargazing', and that's exactly what I wanted to write about...in a really abstract, weird way. I need to stop writing about people being reincarnated as stars, haha.
> 
> But yeah, I'm not as proud of this one, tbh, but it's here!! And that's what matters!!
> 
> Have the loveliest of days :D


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